OPINION:
When addressing the nation after a terror attack at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members, President Joe Biden evoked the memory of his late son, Maj. Beau Biden, a Delaware Army National Guard who served in Iraq and later died of brain cancer.
“We have some sense, like many of you do, what the families of these brave heroes are feeling today,” Mr. Biden remarked on August 26th, “You get this feeling like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest; there’s no way out. My heart aches for you.”
The mainstream media swooned. After all, they went out of their way to paint Mr. Biden as the empathizer-in-chief on the campaign trail, the much-needed tonic to Donald J. Trump’s brashness. On September 14, 2020, the L.A. Times ran the headline: “Joe Biden doesn’t just feel your pain. He has lived it.” Not to be outmatched, CNN and Forbes later published pieces on the importance of “empathy” and how Mr. Biden will be a “consoler-in-chief.”
Yet, Mr. Biden isn’t a gold-star father. His son’s early death, while tragic, was out of his control. He is, however, now the commander-in-chief. He is the protector of our troops. And it was his direct decisions that led to the deaths of 13 U.S. Service members.
When their bodies arrived at Dover Airport Base this week, their caskets all draped with American flags, with their grieving, now gold-star families, crying on the tarmac, Mr. Biden’s facade of empathy finally seemed to fade. He checked his watch multiple times. He couldn’t look heartbroken families in the eye.
“I actually leaned into my son’s mother’s ear and said, ‘I swear to God if he checks his watch one more time…I found it to be the most disrespectful thing,” Mark Schmitz, whose 20-year-old son Jared was killed in the Kabul blast, remarked to Fox News. He described how Mr. Biden repeatedly invoked his son Beau and seemingly had no interest in hearing Jared’s story.
It was cold. It was callous. It was typical Joe Biden.
Mr. Biden’s one-dimensional campaign strategy was that he was an “uniter” and would bring back “dignity” to the office. That he would govern with calmness and competency. The narrative completely ignored who Mr. Biden actually is.
Every so often, during his basement campaign, tightly controlled by his handlers, Mr. Biden slipped up and exposed his real self. Remember his racist rant to a Black radio host if African Americans didn’t show up and vote for him, “you ain’t Black”? It was akin to his slander on Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign that his Republican opponent had the ability to “put y’all back in chains.”
Then there was his visible anger at being questioned by Erroll Barrett, a Black reporter for CBS, about his cognitive abilities.
“That’s like saying you before you got on this program, you take a test where you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?” Mr. Biden replied. The sentiment harkened back to when Mr. Biden worked with segregationist senators in the ‘80s and ‘90s on crime laws that laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration of African American men on hefty crack cocaine sentences.
In Mr. Biden’s mind, “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,” and Barack Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Yes, those comments may be old, but what about Mr. Biden describing Hideki Matsuyama, the 29-year-old Masters golf champion as a “Japanese boy,” during a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga this spring, or just this week, introducing Cedric Richmond, one of his Black Senior Advisors, as “a boy who knows Louisiana,” during a FEMA press conference?
In the White House, Mr. Biden has described his critics as “Neanderthals” and racists promoting “Jim Crow 2.0” voter integrity laws. He called a young co-ed a “lying dog-faced pony soldier on the campaign trail in New Hampshire.” At a stop at a Fiat Chrysler assembly plant, he was accused by one of the workers of wanting to take away gun rights. Mr. Biden got in the man’s face and told him, “You’re full of sh—.” Then, after being asked about getting his son Hunter a job with a Ukrainian gas company in Iowa, he called the questioner a “damn liar,” who was “fat” and “too old to vote for me.”
Which brings us to Hunter.
Mr. Biden has defiantly, and falsely, dubbed Hunter’s laptop scandal, where multiple foreign deals were disclosed, and the “Big Guy” received a 10% cut, as “Russian disinformation.” He has defended Hunter’s burgeoning art career, granting anonymity to the buyers. Then there’s Hunter’s out-of-wedlock child with an Arkansas woman. Joe Biden won’t even publicly acknowledge the grandchild.
When Town & Country ran a profile of the family upon inauguration, the headline was “Get to know all of Joe Biden’s Grandchildren: There a grand total of seven.” No, there’s eight.
That’s all you need to know about who Joe Biden is and never was.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at the Washington Times.
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